also see sending instances Avitar's name in F1 neighborhood with correct name (2nd Copy) not at center of neighborhood.
Note Seen on anther instance of sugar (openSUSE-sugar-Virtualbox install sugar 0.88.0) correctly named so it is transmitting to jabber correctly

f14-Beta-Live CD installed to HD 09/29/2010 2Pm PST
Avitars present on gdm log in to sugar. 90% of garbled form xxxxxxxxx@…
Note My avitar color and name shown 2 times. in center and offset in field with correct name

cp: change color of avitar with new color switcher in About Me
restart
No avitars ever reappear.
It takes complete shutdown and restart to get avitars back
repeat cycle: my central avitar disappears after about 3 minutes?

Does presence service shut down after a fixed time with no traffic? Saw discussion in #telepathy about this today

Note
Update to Presence service to Fix this is not yet in updates-testing F14

still present in soas-i386-20101012.15.iso liveinst from running CD
use of color selector in CP/about me and restart returns you to gdm login; This fixes the xxxxx@jabber names first displayed in f1 Neighborhood.

also in soas-i386-20101014.17.iso if you hit "register" on f3 dropdown, after 8 min delay get Registration failed. Then F1 neighborhood has correct naming.
Seems to be related to not getting full reponse from jabber on initial display of names

# some of buddies on jabber.sl.o didn't publish vcard info on jabber server, thus no way to get nick name; sounds more like a client side bug but it is not reproducible with sugar patches from mentioned sugar-devel post
# right after buddy registration, upstream sugar didn't take into account nick name; for now it is fixed on server side (on jabber.sl.o) but might be better to have client side driven code

Observed same problem using 11.3-os3, fix was to delete ~/.mission=control/accounts/accounts.cfg and restart sugar, then the NICK was displayed on j.s.o or on a local schoolserver correctly.

Did you start 11.3-os3 on the existed ~/.sugar env, ie, it was created by older sugar? Do you have ~/.sugar/default/accounts/accounts.cfg right now? Did you manage to reproduce the issue once more after removing ~/.mission=control/accounts/accounts.cfg?

It can't be distro or server specific. The current status on jabber.sugarlabs.org. There are some accounts (seems to be Sugar Shell created, i.e., with "/sugar" resource) that never [re]published proper nickname via pubsub, i.e., published bare jids as nicks.

The way to check this issue on client side is looking into accounts.cfg file create by telepathy-mission-control, if it contains bare jids for "param-nickname"/"Nickname"/"NormalizedName" keys, thus, jabber server will never know nicknames.

Ok, I have a XS-0.7 running in my testing network, after registering with the XS neighbourhood was showing the short nicks. After shutting the XOs down for 24 hours, now neighbourhood is showing the long jid in place of nicks. I think mission-control is messing with the accounts.cfg file at some point after registering to the schoolserver. I'm going to start with os885 with full sugar debugging enable on a machine that was never registered to see if I can catch just when this occurs.